Monday, November 5, 2012

The Triangle of Emotional Self-Destruction

Except from a talk given by Thomas Sheridan in Norway in September 2012 on the dangers of rumination and revenge fantasies.

One can tell who has been a genuine victim of a psychopathic abuse
situation. You feel the intensity of their broken soul and it can bring
you to tears just watching how these people look down when they talk,
and their overall lack of energy. They are filled with a kind of
paralysing heartbreak and muted deep trauma and are not obsessed with
hatred and revenge. They won't spend their time on their alleged
abuser's social networking page making fun of photos of the new life
without them. They find it too painful to even look. The genuine victim
won't transfer their own frustrations and unresolved pointless vendetta
onto another useful target when their initial object of hate pays them
no attention. The genuine victim wants to forget and just restore
themselves and seek to understand this experience and what they can
learn from it. Then, and only then, can meaningful recovery be attained.

The damage which a puzzling person may have inflicted on an individual can linger for many years afterwards in the form of depression and negative thinking. The more pathological types of abusers tend to be very aware of this. They revel in this constant drip-feed of emotional turmoil and grief they leave within others.Most targets of manipulative predators socially isolate themselves, often for years at a time, dwelling on the negatives and finding themselves spiralling deeper and deeper into depression. Psychologists refer to this as rumination—repeating negative thoughts, dwelling continually upon regret, recalling conversations and mentally replaying all the things they wish they had said yet doing nothing to change the situation—apart from using others as compensatory punching bags for their own failure to attain revenge on the actual person who hurt them.Targets end up over-thinking, trying to make sense, trying to get the answer. Often, this leads to distorted rationalisations such as declaring anyone and everyone who has ever annoyed, offended, hurt or damaged them in some manner to be a 'sociopath', 'narcissist', 'psychopath', and so on. This is tragic on two counts as it leads to the social destruction of the ruminating individual, while also allowing real manipulators off the hook by granting them to say, “Oh they claim everyone who ever pissed them off to be a psychopath!” Rumination is a very toxic trap which targets must strive to remove themselves from before they end up becoming their own abuser in the long haul.

BOTTOM LINE: YOU WILL NEVER GET ANY MOVIE-STYLE REVENGE, EVER - MOVE ON AND MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR LIFE TO DEAL WITH THE EXPERIENCE IN SUCH A WAY IT BECOMES A PERSONAL EVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE.

LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE OF ALL

Thomas Sheridan is the
author of Puzzling People: the Labyrinth of the Psychopath MORE HERE